EU phone home! Cloudy transatlantic cable coughs, gags, chokes A major transatlantic cable linking the EU and the US appears to have been cut, causing major problems for cloud operators. Global frontend security service Cloudflare and huge hoster DigitalOcean both reported significant connectivity problems on Monday as a consequence of a fault in the Telia transatlantic cable. Most large …
The USS Jimmy Carter doesn't need to cut the cables to put surveillance equipment on them. The NSA operatives submariners don't even need to get wet. The vessel hugs the cable and the hatch on the specially modified hull opens, allowing access to the cable in perfectly dry, normal pressure environment.
*Visualize a black submarine icon instead of a black helicopter :)
Trying to connect to something in the UK that I could tell was clearly there but timing out my ssh attempts. Going to an intermediate worked (which used a diffrent cable) but the direct traceroute showed lots of packet loss and a route via Telia. It seems to have stabilised now, though.
"it was a planned update that went wrong"
I do quite a lot of remote updates. Firewalls and SANs are particular fun but I always go through the same routine:
Recce and verify the infrastructure - bonus: the docs get updated!
Get back door in place
Cross fingers
Do job
Watch monitoring system - a rather large set of Icinga instances
Ring untightens after a while
Having a limited form of OCD seems to help as do clusters.
For my money - it was an operator screw up rather than dodgy software. Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence (or a hangover)
Perhaps a larger team with oversight might be proscribed in future for this sort of work - it's quite important.
Cheers
Jon
PS Must learn RegHTML (TM) my post looks shite.
RegHTML is just HTML; you're simply restricted in what you can use.
See the guidelines and search for "Formatting". (Alas there is no fragment anchor in the page for that section. A suggestion for the Reg infrastructure: have the Perl scripts automatically add id attributes with unique values to h1, h2, and h3 elements.)
Note that once you get a badge you unlock more HTML elements, but one of them is pre, and the Reg's handling of pre was basically useless, the last time I tried it. Also, once you've had 100 posts accepted you can insert links (with "a" elements).
Unfortunately, the last I checked, the Reg's posting system didn't recognize HTML entities, which makes it a bit of a pain to avoid having things that look like tags interpreted as tags. If Preview is reliable, that's still the case.
I had time for many wondrous theories during the downtime.
I quickly noted that it was primarily hitting USA sites (I don't often go to asian websites I admit). My theories were among others:
1) NSA doing something (the obvious and bland one).
2) It's an unannounced protest action against the FCCs action with regards to Net Neutrality (this theory was shut down when I realised that comcast.com was down as well).
3) A massive DDOS hit some central hub somewhere.
None of my theories were "Telia forgot to reboot after applying legacy updates to Windows XP"
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